Welp, at least this young woman wasn't chewing anyone's face off, eating her roommate, or flinging her own intestines at the police. What she did allegedly do admit to ATF officials that she had made six plus-or-minus one pipe bombs, that she "has a passion for it," and that "detonating them for recreation was her 'hobby.'" (Though to be honest, who doesn't enjoy a good exploding toilet now and then?)
What bothers me is the report that, on the all-mighty Facebook, she described her political views as "anarchist," and later it is reported that she said, "I despise all law enforcement and any governing authority. I am not one for selective targeting but mass destruction."
*facepalm*
From now on, I will be discussing a hypothetical type of person who builds pipe bombs and thinks that makes them an "anarchist." I truly hope Ms. Savage is the nice girl her family claims her to be, albeit a nice girl with a perhaps unwise pyrotechnical bug.
Remember how we all used to make fun of the AOL script kiddies for thinking they were real 1337 #4><0Rz? I mean, according to this article they were dangerous enough to be reported to the DoD, but... they were also jackasses. Jackasses who made anybody interested in poking around a bit to see how the parts work look like a threat.
I'm not arguing that people building pipe bombs isn't dangerous, or that the most awesomely-named department in the government, the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, isn't justified in quashing this type of behavior. What I'm arguing is that the hypothetical kind of jackass who does something like that and calls themselves an anarchist is...
...well, hell. It's not like I have a right to kick anybody out any club. The sort of baby-step lifestyle anarchism I'm promoting on this blog has been ridiculed before, and the criticisms about it not taking a purposeful enough stance against Statist power is not without merit in its own right.
But I think we can also agree that violent propaganda of the deed not only has failed to curb oppressive power before (such as Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which set into motion a few World Wars, a few hundred million peoples' deaths, and decades of two-world hegemony over most of the globe), but also that it's been the tool of religious terrorists since Guy Fawkes.
I know we've all taken a hankering to those pretty awesome masks since V for Vendetta, but let's not forget that Fawkes's propaganda of the deed was motivated by his religious fanaticism. People link him with anarchism because he wanted to destroy something, and that says something about the image of anarchism, no? I mean, I think it basically says that people view anyone who is a reckless idiot who wants things to explode as an anarchist, right?
Since when were anarchism and wisdom mutually exclusive?
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